Avant-Punk:
A Cult Explodes . . . and a Movement Is Born

1. Avant-Punk Lives

One day a few months ago it dawned on me that this time it was
different. Ever since hearing the MC5 in Detroit after Chicago '68 I
had been waiting, hoping, or at least rooting for a new, clamorously
urban style of rock and roll to, as they say, take over the world. All
those who worked in this style consciously allied themselves with
avant-garde movements in music, poetry, and/or the visual arts, and I
believed that even at their most apolitical they were politically
avant-garde, too, because they were uncomplacent and anti-liberal
without being reactionary. These artists were always
controversial. They always gathered enthusiastic journalistic
support. And they always went nowhere commercially.

Detroit was not the birthplace of this avant-punk style, of course:
the MC5 and the Stooges represented the second phase of a music that
began in New York with the Velvet Underground. But just as the Velvets
might well have originated avant-punk without thinking too much about
its obvious precedents--the dirty raveups of the Yardbirds and the
early Kinks and the garage-band one-shots of the original punks
collected on Lenny Kaye's Nuggets anthology--so the Stooges and the 5
might well have been all but unaware of the Velvets. Put young,
relatively unskilled white musicians from an industrial city together
with some electric guitars, grant them aesthetic acuteness by nature
or nurture, and eventually it's bound to happen: rock and roll that
differentiates itself from its (fundamentally black and rural) sources
by taking on the crude, ugly, perhaps brutal facts of the (white and
urban) prevailing culture, rather than hiding behind its bland
fašade. The underlying idea of this rock and roll will be to harness
late industrial capitalism in a love-hate relationship whose
difficulties are acknowledged, and sometimes disarmed, by means of
ironic aesthetic strategies: formal rigidity, role-playing, humor. In
fact, ironies will pervade and, in a way, define this project: the
lock-step drumming will make liberation compulsive, pain-threshold
feedback will stimulate the body while it deadens the ears, lyrics
will mean more than (missing).

The rarity of avant-punk made it seem more precious. Between the time
the Velvets formed in 1966 and the time Patti Smith began to assemble
her group at CBGB in 1975, only four other bands of any consequence
entered the tradition: the MC5, whose unironic crusade for hip was
aestheticized by the sloppy, almost aleatory power of their feedback;
Iggy and the Stooges, whose command of every star quality except fame
made them the most influential of the avant-punks between the Velvets
and the Ramones; the Modern Lovers, whose sole hard-rock album wasn't
released until well after Jonathan Richman's brain had softened; and
the irrepressibly irresponsible New York Dolls.

Of course, a similar buzz was provided by more profitable musicians,
most prominently Lou Reed, who professionalized the Velvets' style;
Blue Oyster Cult, who aped a host of more na´ve groups with such
immaculate impassivity that in the end they convinced not only the
audience themselves; and municipal parking garage bands like Alice
Cooper and Kiss, heirs of the original punks who weren't above
stealing from their bohemian cousins. Reed's Rock n Roll Animal
is keen heavy metal; the Cult's Agents of Fortune is history as
farce; Alice's "I'm Eighteen" is a direct forerunner of "Anarchy in
the U.K." Yet in retrospect they lack any flash of radical
individualism. Not so with the avant-punks. Detractors labeled their
basic approach monotonous, but the distance within what was a
relatively unexplored musical territory proved vast; Emmylou Harris
will satisfy your yen for Linda Ronstadt a lot better than--to choose
the closest pair I can think of--the Velvets' "White Light/White Heat"
will satisfy your need for the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner." And
because details of approach differed so, all these bands were
possessed of rock and roll's secret: they played a supposedly
uninnovative style as if they'd invented it.

Needless to say, the art-commerce dichotomy was one reason the style
remained so rare; a young musician might admire Lou Reed or Iggy, but
following in their footsteps required conviction. As the Dolls and
Patti Smith played their rock-star roles with ironic abandon, landed
big-money deals, and made second albums that sold worse than their
first, it seemed painfully probable that the avant-punks' infatuation
with teen America would go forever unreciprocated. As an addict of the
music, I was pleased when CBGB turned into a venue for inheritors like
Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Tuff Darts, and gratified
when Blondie and Mink DeVille came up with better-realized albums,
artistically and commercially, than I would have predicted. Maybe the
heartland would finally be moved. I rooted, and I dared to hope. But I
wasn't placing bets.

That was August or so. Now, a couple of months later, avant-punk seems
likely to make some sort of breakthrough. I don't know how big it will
be or whether I'll like its shape when it's over. All I know is that I
haven't been this excited about rock and roll in at least 10
years. I'm buying records, calling people up to announce finds,
playing the Vibrators and the Radiators From Space for everyone who
walks in the door. First it was isolated artists, then a vanguard, but
now it looks like a movement. When dozens of groups are out there
making certifiably exciting music, it's hard to believe there isn't
also a real audience--bigger than a cult, smaller than a mass--ready
to make exciting noises of its own.

2. Creative Misapprehensions

Unless you memorize Additional Consumer News and the Pazz & Jop
Product Report, or peruse rock magazines other than Rolling Stone, you
probably can't quite place the Vibrators or the Radiators From
Space. That's because they're based in England, land of the Sex
Pistols and home of "new wave" "funk rock"
as a social rather than a strictly artistic
phenomenon. For despite all the publicity Johnny Rotten has received,
the movement he symbolizes is still local to Great Britain. In the
U.S., it's "underground"--it has to be sought out. And it is.

As with Haight-Ashbury, which inspired instant on-the-spot obituaries
and scant recorded music during its earliest notoriety, the British
new wave is already being mourned by those who discovered it first and
has occasioned only a few American-release albums so far. British punk
records are available, of course--mostly as singles, mostly as
imports. But their notoriety precedes them. Anyone who's read 500
words about Johnny Rotten knows that this music embodies an uprising
against youth unemployment in Britain and that the Sex Pistols' "God
Save the Queen" hit big despite a blackball by the BBC and major
retailers. And anyone who ever glances at the British music press,
which caters to both fans and the trade, knows punk is the hottest
news in British rock since Liverpool. It's my guess that these success
stories have done more to fuel the latest burst of enthusiasm for punk
in America than all the imports put together--and more, too, than any
of the excellent non-hit LPs to come out of CBGB. Rock and roll has
always thrived on star fever.

Yet avant-punk began in America, and star fever was not how it spread
to the U.K. When conceptually sophisticated local art movements
disperse, distortion or vulgarization can result, but so can a kind of
creative misapprehension that rolls right through apparent formal
cul-de-sacs. That's what happened when the Ramones toured England. The
Ramones exploit the standard ironic strategies--role-playing, humor,
and extreme rigidity--to make a powerful but ambiguous statement that
both celebrates and mocks the frustrated energy of the ordinary
American teenage male. But so unmistakably did they imply that any
leather-jacketed geek can master three-chord rock and roll that in
England, where teenage males were desperate for mastery in any form,
all their other messages were ignored. In the wake of the Ramones
summer '76 tour, bands playing Ramonseish avant-punk sprang up all
over Great Britain. But where the Ramones distanced themselves from
their own vaunted dumbness (it's not Joey Ramone the fictional
character, much less the 25-year-old cat-owner behind the pseudonym,
who beats on the brat or doesn't wanna be a pinhead no more), the
English punks preferred simply to flaunt theirs. In comparison, the
Ramones seem attenuated--wonderful, but arty. When the Clash snarls,
"I get violent/When I'm fucked up/I get silent/When I'm drugged up,"
they're saying what they have to say more directly than anyone in
avant-punk since the Detroit days, and it works. I'm not convinced,
however, that the misapprehension of English punk by Americans will
prove equally creative. The general jolt of activity and excitement is
welcome. The kids at Max's who recall a B side by Chris Spedding--"Do
the pose/All you have to do is wear the clothes"--have vulgarized what
began as brutally witty street fashions, and star fever could distort
an avant-garde scene that became healthy only when it faced up to its
own modest commercial potential. Although I approve of the
British-inspired vogue for independent singles, I worry about how the
music on the albums I hope follow is going to sound.

The irresistible straightforwardness and conviction of so much English
new wave goes with an energy that is political rather than aesthetic,
and no less advanced artistically for that. But the source of this
energy is a state of class warfare with no real parallel in this
country, where repressive desublimation still has enough money behind
it to make obliqueness aesthetically appropriate. Translated into
American, the sincere rage of Eater and the Clash is likely to issue
in molten-metal torrents of boredom and misogyny that lack even the
justification of metaphorical license. I find it ominous that when
England's Damned came over to CBGB, the opening act, Cleveland's Dead
Boys--a runty cross between macho Ted Nugent, decadent Iggy, and the
despicable Stranglers--established themselves as the hottest new punks
in the land.

None of which has diminished my excitement yet. English punk turns
everyone who likes it into a helpless fan; because it's still so
local, there are only second-hand experts here. So I buy singles on
the basis of gossip or title or picture sleeve or Pazz & Jop
rating, and read whatever comes my way--Simon Frith's column in
Creem, one issue of the Xeroxed London fanmag Sniffin'
Glue, a July piece from Time that Sire Records sent me in
late September. And even though Ira Robbins of Trouser Press
claims it's all over but the selling, even though a few recent parody
records muster enough musical authority to excite the skepticism they
intend, I'm hot to get to London and see for myself.

Meanwhile, I cling to my scraps of plastic and print and attempt my
own creative misapprehension. I keep thinking of Kingston, where I
spent eight days in search of reggae roots in 1973. I found then that
there was no guided tour, no way to hit the record companies, radio
stations, and retailers for a guaranteed overview. The roots were too
deep and various to be rationalized so easily. Almost any persevering
rudeboy could connect with one of the dozens and dozens of small-time
record producers, plug a topic or image of the day into a rhythmic
formula supplied by a community of poorly paid session men, and come
up with an arresting or even important piece of music. The English
punks (most of whom are reggae fans) provide their own
formula--Sniffin' Glue published a diagram of the basic
chords--and sometimes scare up enough capital to become entrepreneurs
themselves. I bet not all of them are poor. But they share with the
rudeboys their inexperience, their threatened maleness, their
potential for demagogy, their need to reconcile class identification
with professional/artistic ambition, their inchoate politics of
rebellion, and their ultimate vulnerability. And so they are worthy of
pity and awe as well as skepticism.

To a lover of avant-punk who holds proudly to his square politics--his
belief that only collective action will enable the mass of
dispossessed people to attain personal power--this is a reasonable
facsimile of a dream come true. I don't expect it to last. It's only
culture, flawed culture, ridden with evident contradictions and
resting on a material substructure of monumental inertia and fearsome
ill will. But for the moment I'll settle. Rock and roll!

3. Fascism, Sexism, and Old Farts

I am not a punk. I am 35 years old, fervently attached to my marriage
and my work, and better off materially than I could have wished or
imagined in 1970. But someone once flattered me (inordinately) by
writing that I seemed classless and almost ageless, and my excitement
over this music no doubt connects with the fact that I can create such
an impression. Conversely, much of the resistance avant-punk inspires,
although expressed in careful musical or sociological formulations,
has an ad hominem dimension of age or class. About music I could go on
forever, and about age there isn't much to say--perhaps having to keep
up with a couple of kids will eventually dispel my feeling that rushes
of musical adrenalin are good for the system, but I doubt it. The
sociological misgivings of the anti-punks, on the other hand, seem to
me quite substantial.

In a world where lib-rad goody-goodies compare rock concerts to
Nuremberg rallies and dismiss all electric guitarists as phallic
narcissists, it's not hard to understand why so many bright young
avant-punk musicians and fans consider abstractions like "fascism" and
"sexism" squarer than love beads. Not that such terms can't refer to
anything real. But they've turned into scarewords, deployed by
comfortable hypocrites who pretend that to name a manifestation of
horror is a meaningful way to control it. Nevertheless, I don't buy
the (always unstated) defense of fascism and sexism as they manifest
themselves in avant-punk. This isn't merely another ironic
confrontation with brutal facts that are prettied up and exploited by
mainstream hard rock. For one thing, whether such horrors are disarmed
by aesthetic means is even more iffy than it is in the case of
mechanical cacophony or adolescent aggression. Worse still, for
American-style punks even to admit that disarmament is their
purpose--if indeed it is--is to violate their own ironic strategies,
while for the English to abandon their straightforwardness in such
contexts, as they sometimes do--or claim to--is at best a questionable
tactic.

Avant-punks's vaguely Nazisymp reputation seemed mostly a matter of
aura until recently. Given the disciplined brutality of the basic
style and the S & M flirtations of first Lou Reed and then Iggy
(both sometimes sojourners in Berlin), those who get nervous whenever
500 people chant in time were sure to see the worst in David
Johansen's goosesteps or Brother J. C. Crawford's exhortations to
kick out the jams. The rest of us, however--especially those who
believe that sometimes collective violence worked for good--were not
obliged to agree. But then the Dictators, counted by some as another
seminal avant-punk band, made this aura their central "joke," to the
point where somgwriter Andy Shernoff placed a racist remark (about
Puerto Ricans) in an early issue of Punk. And then came the Ramones,
with three songs referring to Germany on their first album; an
especially charming couplet, "I'm Nazi schatze/Y'know I work for the
fatherland," highlighted their climactic "Today Your Love, Tomorrow
the World," which regularly moved a few aspiring punks to heil-Hitler
salutes. In England, where the Ramones have been so influential,
swastikas are even more popular among punks than they are here; to
middle class people who have confidence in such formulations, the
English punks, with their defiant lumpen nihilism, might well recall
"the growing masses outside all class strata" described by Hannah
Arendt as "natural prey to Fascist movements." So it's no surprise
that an English band, the Cortinas, has released a single called
"Fascist Dictator," the boastful momentum of which recalls the Stones'
"I'm a King Bee" done double-time: "I'm a fascist dictator/That's what
I am/I'm a fascist dictator/Ain't like no other man."

None of this looks very good, but none of it is as bad as it looks. If
anything, the new punk is consciously anti-fascist, which is a step up
from the apathy and complacency of most rock and roll. Unless you
think the Ramones identify with Charlie Manson, the Texas chain-saw
killer, CIA men, SLAers, geeks, glue-sniffers, and electroshock
patients--an absurd misreading as far as I'm concerned--then you must
conclude that their intention is satiric, and the same applies when
they turn to fascist characters. Meanwhile, England, unlike the U.S.,
faces a clear, self-identified fascist threat, the National Front,
which most punks take the trouble to oppose explicitly; when Johnny
Rotten calls Queen Elizabeth's government "a fascist regime" it's fair
to assume he wants no part of it. Even the Cortinas' song works as a
Ramones-style irony.

The problem is that irony is wasted on pinheads. The Cortinas'
protagonist is like no other man for two reasons--he's a fascist
dictator and he gets no pleasure from love. Even if the Cortinas do
intend an invidious equation, each side of which devalues the other,
those of their fans who get no pleasure from love--victimized by one
of the brutal modern facts that made punk necessary--may not see it
that way. They may conclude that if the loss of pleasure is their
fate, they might as well, in the classic fascist pattern, seek power
instead. Considering how many hippies ended up in authoritarian
religious movements when they discovered that enlightenment did not
solve their problems, it seems likely that a few of those saluting
Ramones fans will undergo a comparable political life-change when they
discover the limits of energy. Beyond the liberal-baiting, beyond the
image of horror, avant-punk is forebodingly ambivalent here, with a
complexity barely suggested by this one stanza of Iggy Pop's "China
Girl": "My Little China Girl/You shouldn't mess with me/I'll ruin
everything you are/I'll give you television/I'll give you eyes of
blue/I'll give you men who want to rule the world."

The parallel issue of sexism, implicit in the roots of rock and roll,
is even knottier; but here, too, the evidence is mixed. In New York,
the two most prestigious bands, Television and Talking Heads, avoid
both macho and wimp and are notably unantagonistic toward
women. Ironic strategies abound, especially from the Ramones and
Blondie, who puts on her bombshell image so convincingly that she's
turned into a rockmag pinup (how do you jerk off ironically?), and
whose theme song rips "Miss Groupie Supreme" to shreds. In England,
the Sex Pistols and the Clash direct their underclass rage, so often
deflected toward women in rock and roll, right where it belongs, at
the rich and powerful, and social-problem cliches are invoked much
more often than women-problem cliches. But irony is double-edged, and
the mechanical, pleasureless, hostile sexuality projected by names
like Vibrators, Sex Pistols, and (get this one) Buzzcocks is, once
again, more than liberal-baiting. The avant-punk scene is certainly no
better place for women than any other rock scene and in crucial
instances it's worse.

"Some day I'm gonna smash your face," barks 27-year-old
ex-schoolteacher Hugh Cornwall of the (talkin' about the Boston)
Stranglers in his first words to an American audience, and he's echoed
by young short and whiny Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys: "Don't look at
me that way bitch/Your face is gonna get a punch." I am assured that
such metatheatre, the candor of which is new to rock and roll, merely
desublimates an adolescent fantasy that has always fed into the
music's aggressive sexuality, and is directed solely at the kind of
fucked-up female--vain and slavish, sucking after any connection to
power, and (to quote Bators) "born with dishpan hands"--who afflicts
the scene. Only I don't believe the fantasy to be adolescent--gender,
not age, is what's relevant--and I wonder (rhetorically) why more
putdown songs aren't devoted to fucked-up male hangers-on. I do make a
distinction between the Stranglers, posers with the gall to claim
their misogyny constitutes a positive political protest, and the
altogether more desperate and vulnerable--hence revelatory--Dead
Boys. But I don't want to listen to either. I got loads of
hostilities, but my need to beat up women is repressed, and I hope it
stays that way. It'd be some world if we all went around killing our
fathers.

If it appears that I'm confusing art with morality, or with life,
well, I didn't start it. This is the Stranglers and the Dead Boys I'm
talking about, not Oedipus Rex or Celine or, for that matter, the
Rolling Stones, and if the confusion of art with life is common on a
scene which becomes ever more unsophisticated as it expands, that's at
least partly the fault of the second-rate artists who are being
misunderstood. Desublimation my ass. Tales of affectless protopunks in
jail for beating on their girlfriends (how do you punch someone
ironically?), or of the varieties of consensual stoopidity, remind me
that the only reason no woman was ever seduced--or raped--by a book is
that books don't have penises. Art is only art, but it can really
damage people anyway. Avant-punk sexism not only repels those smart,
unmasochistic women who don't choose to cultivate the cool that
plugging safely into the scene requires, it also has the effect of
encouraging less savvy and independent women to fulfil it's
prophecy. And while it may be true that the only way to defuse certain
fantasies and forbidden ideas is to bring them into the open, it's
dishonest to pretend that such idealistic motives--or such ideal
results--are usually present here.

So it isn't just goody-goodies and old farts who stay away from
CBGB. All good rock and roll risks fascism simply by generating mass
energy, and much of it flirts with sexism simply by exploring the
music's traditional subject matter. Sometimes the risks are worth it,
sometimes they aren't. It's not enough to argue that the Dead Boys
pervert the Ramones--not when the Ramones' deadpan invited the
perversion. I love the Ramones myself. I think the settled over-25s
(and sensitive under-25s) who equate the Ramones with the Dead Boys
are wrong. But their mistake is at least as understandable as the
mistake of bright young avant-punks who think abstractions like
"Fascism" and "sexism" are squarer than love beads.

4. The Next Medium Thing

It really is different this time, because the music will be
there. Over the next six months, Americans will have a chance to
purchase albums by dozens of artists who spit at the conventional
wisdom of the record industry, or seem to. Many of them will reflect
signings made possible by the most recent punk explosion, and almost
all will share with punk its paucity of sophisticated production
techniques, such as chords. But not all of them will qualify as
avant-punk. England's Elvis Costello is more pub; Boston's Loco
Alexander is basically an eccentric white r & b stylist; the lead
singer of New York's Shirts has a big part in Hair; Los
Angeles's Runaways are punky female Monkees created by a record
producer. And even bands that clearly are in the style hedge their
bets. The first two British albums in the U.S. sweepstakes, by the Jam
and the Stranglers, were accompanied by press material making it clear
that these boys were really "new wave," not that nasty old punk.

In other words, the record industry is playing it both ways. Not many
music execs like the stuff, which is designed to blast away every
"artistic" standard they hold dear. But unlike the actual
standard-bearers--established rock musicians like those who reportedly
put together a protest petition when English A & M briefly signed
the Sex Pistols--the executives don't feel threatened where they
live. If it makes noise, they're set up to make money off it. Many of
them sense that Johnny Rotten is something special, perhaps
unprecedented, and all of them have heard that the two giants, Warners
and CBS, are vying for him. They're also aware that Warners has picked
up the American punk company, Sire, from ABC, and that CBS has been
dealing with Britain's pub-to-punk Stiff label and is preparing a
major push with the Vibrators. Still, they have their own tastes and
truisms. They know that the Sire catalogue also includes Renaissance
and old Fleetwood Mac, that Stiff means an in with Graham Parker, that
English phenoms like T. Rex and Slade have fizzled here. They know the
radio stations and their own distribution networks are filled with the
kind of tasteful rock fans who are outraged by punk. And they know--or
think they know--that the rock audience is as put off by the rough,
the extreme, and the unfamiliar as they are.

This rock audience is the one the execs created--more passive and
cautious than that of a decade ago not just because kids have changed,
although they have, but because it is now dominated statistically by
different, and more passive, kids. My first assumption about punk is
that it will attract new blood to rock and roll, and my first question
is whether a transfusion is possible. Will the marginal fans of boogie
and heavy metal decide they're tired of all that calculated
spontaneity and putative self-expression? Will they turn from those
big, thick cushions of loudness and decorative licks of musicianship?
Will something real be forged from the surviving dogmas of teen
rebellion? Or will punk artists who only appear to spit at the
conventional wisdom of the industry sneak between instant oblivion and
world takeover?

The prime contenders for such compromised punk superstardom are the
Stranglers and the Dead Boys, either of whom could convert to modishly
bombed-out heavy metal inside of two months, and the Rods a/k/a Eddie
and the Hot Rods, basically a double-time boogie band. In America, any
grander artistic hopes must rest with those hard-working heroes of
concept punk, the Ramones, who have charted a single and attracted the
biggest booking agent in rock, both inconceivable feats a year
ago. Among the English bands the fate of the Sex Pistols is crucial;
Johnny Rotten looks like a rock star who could matter, and he might
ease things for the Jam and the Vibrators, both pop-based, hook-prone
hard rock bands of a sort that has proved too tough for comfort
before, and even for the Clash, so crude and unpretty that they
qualify as protest music in every sense of the word. Rotten is so
special, though, that his commercial impact might have negative
musical effects--so far, he's found truth in the kind of overstated
self-dramatization that has killed so much rock and roll, but I don't
look forward to his imitators. That's why I'm rooting for the
Ramones--they suggest a way out of his expressionistic cul-de-sac,
just as Rotten suggests a way out of their formalistic one, and the
syntheses could be stunning, as Television, Patti Smith, and Talking
Heads have already demonstrated.

By experimenting with certain implicit imperatives of rock and roll,
punk cleans out the ears. It's one thing to theorize that most of what
is called hard rock these days is really a species of MOR, another to
recoil at the goo of Foreigner after scouring yourself with the Clash
for a week. It's one thing to know that great stylists are born of the
sort of na´ve audacity that's unhampered by technical preconceptions,
another to hear Tom Verlaine turn into a great rock guitarist who owes
almost nothing to blues beyond bent notes. It's one thing to believe
that music need not swing to activate, another to pogo up and down to
the Clash while some Italian Communist who likes Pink Floyd--a
combination that would ordinarily seem wondrous--complains about "the
rhythm of death." I mean, this music definitely decreases your
tolerance for sentimentality.

Sentimentality has its uses, of course. Basically, it is
sentimentality that enables us to believe in things, to get through
life, and because these are artists who don't yet believe in very
much, I worry about how they and their audience are going to
manage. Think of it--they don't even claim to believe in rock and
roll. Yet that too I find cleansing, because the music business has
transformed believing in rock and roll into the most odious
sentimentality of all. Rock and roll isn't something you believe in,
in that onanistic, self-reflexive way that has vitiated so much
modernist art. It is something you do to get somewhere else, until the
doing becomes a kind of belief in itself. That, after all, is the
avant-punk attitude, and at this pregnant moment it seems at least
possible that these rock and rollers won't end up where they began.